Extracting juice from fruits and vegetables is an age old practice that has been accomplished with a wide range and variety of apparatus. Most extraction is done in very large volume on a commercial basis. The apparatus for accomplishing the task is usually designed for squeezing a specific variety of fruit to produce a product that can be transported and stored for a long period of time. Whatever its specific job and character, large scale commercial juice recovery machines are not suitable for home use even on a reduced scale. Moreover, such machines do not exist for squeezing many of the vegetables.
Carrot juice is an example. Highly nutritious when fresh, and greatly valued by those who seek out nutritious food in natural form, fresh carrot juice is not available except in an occassional retail natural food store. Apparatus for squeezing juice from carrots, peas and other low liquid content materials has not been available. The pressure required to extract juice from such materials is too great. What few juice pressers are available are useful only for squeezing juices from citrus fruit and the like in which the proportion of juice is great and inefficiency is masked by the volume of juice.
The home juice extractor has relied on a combination of a small amount of pressure and much shreding and tearing with apparatus capable of extracting juice from oranges, lemons and grapefruit, and usually nothing more. In practice, most of us are denied the juice of all but a few fruits, and denied fresh juice from still fewer fruits.
A variety of food choppers and food processers make it possible to divide fruits and vegetables quite finely. They cannot provide juice, but they can condition materials to facilitate juice extraction. The amount of force required to squeeze juice from low liquid materials, even when finely divided, has made small volume, manually operated extractors impractical. Thus, notwithstanding that juice extraction is an ancient practice which is now accomplished with a wide variety of apparatus, a practical home device capable of efficient extraction of juice from a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in small volume has not been available. The invention has provided such a device.